Editor’s note: What follows is Dad’s account (under the pen name Grace Fuller) of his own involvement with the Style Invitational, a weekly humor contest in the Style section of the Washington Post. The contest ran for nearly 30 years until it was unceremoniously axed by the powers that be at the Post in January of this year. However, the contest lives on, now known simply at “The Invitational” and hosted on Gene Weingarten’s “The Gene Pool” on Substack.
1993. When I had seen ink about five times in the Style Invitational, I started to keep track of my own performance with a Microsoft Works spreadsheet on an Epson 100 home computer that had two 5.25″ floppy drives and no hard drive. Realizing I needed context to reflect my own glory, I went back to the beginning and added the names and numbers of the other ur-Losers — Hank Wallace, Oslo, Tom Gearty, Chuck Smith, Mike Thring, Bob Zane, Jennifer Hart, etc.
I kept that going for my own amusement alone. In July of 1994, I met the other Not Ready for the Algonquin Roundtable Society (NRARS) founders, Paul Alter, Arthur Adams, Chuck Smith, and Sarah Worcester, and shortly thereafter a few more, as the monthly brunch tradition started to gather steam. A few of these antique souls professed interest in the stats, so I began to mail out, in hand-addressed stamped envelopes, a dozen copies of a weekly one-page listing of the top 50 or so ink-earners to that point, through about Week 60. (I no longer have paper copies of those earliest mailings, although I do have some old floppies in Bin #225 in the basement that perhaps some day a forensic cybernetician may be able to get some data out of.)
By around Week 100 I had added an electronic typewriter to my publishing empire, and began to produce, in parallel with the stats listing from the mighty two-floppy Epson, a highly mannered round-up of recent events on F2 and the monthly brunches. I affected what I thought was an arch tone and larded it with in-jokes, which of course now are a bit opaque, many of them.
The electronic typewriter was succeeded by a series of increasingly irksome attempts to keep all of this data in spreadsheets on more powerful machines. At some point I learned HTML and began to post the stats on Gopherdrool. Soon then came ACCESS, and the effort to keep it all going consumed my very being.
Now we have put aside childish things. I use ACCESS only to take in fresh data, and then I feed a view of it to the Perl Stats Engine, which builds everything else. It is my hope that one day, long after I am dead, it will continue to run on its own—it will read the Post, extract the data, upload to nrars.org, schedule brunches, and make up reasons it can’t attend LoserFest.
March 2022. I suddenly dropped it all when I was discovered to have a brain tumor and I knew that I would not be able to keep up the effort for long. The Committee of Eight was formed from Kyle Hendrickson, Gary Crockett, Jon Gearhart, Duncan Stevens, Steve Leifer, Kathleen Delano, Dave Prevar, and Pat Myers, and they have taken over every detail of the stats work, and improved it in detail. I don’t have to worry about any of it anymore.
What Gary has done is use regular expressions in Perl to scrape up ink detail from the online version of of the end of the print Invitational and the beginning of the Substack version, and he’s clarified some areas that needed work in the stats displays. I myself am in the Hall of Fame, and sitting just south of 600 blots of ink. Perhaps I can use ChatGPT to write seven more entries for myself.
Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies 
Leave a comment